David Bouchier

Commentator

David began as a print journalist in London and taught at a British university for almost twenty years. After coming to the United States in 1986 he continued to teach and to publish a regular humor column in The New York Times regional edition. He joined WSHU as a weekly commentator in 1992, becoming host of Sunday Matinee in 1996. His latest book of essays, Peripheral Vision, was published in 2011. His other books include A Few Well Chosen Words, The Song of Suburbia, The Cats and the Water Bottles, The Accidental Immigrant and Writer at Work. He lives in Stony Brook, New York with his wife who is a professor at Stony Brook University, and two un-musical cats.

My parents never sent me to summer camp. They believed that families should go on vacation together, no matter how painful the experience was for all concerned. But a lot of things have changed since my childhood. In particular, Dr. Benjamin Spock dreamed up the idea that children should not be repressed by arbitrary discipline, and must be allowed to express themselves. Since then, the family vacation has declined, and the summer camp industry has boomed.

Consultancy is the ultimate universal job opportunity. Anyone can set up as a consultant on just about anything, apart from the great monopolies of medicine and law. You can buy the skills of an ex-architect, or an ex-computer programmer, an ex-banker, or even an ex-executive for a tiny fraction of what they would cost if they had real jobs.

There has been flurry of interest in robotics and automation recently. This is one of those stories that comes and goes. People have been fascinated by automatons since the time of Leonardo da Vinci, and science fiction writers have been speculating about robots and artificial intelligence since the 1920s. But now reality has caught up with imagination, and these futuristic devices are no longer in the future. A lot of people have begun to wonder how we are going to live with robots, and how they will change our lives.

Yesterday marked the official arrival of spring, the Vernal Equinox, surely one of the most welcome calendar dates in the year. Weather has nothing to do with it. We have certainly not escaped from winter on March 21. On this date in 1967, New York had nearly ten inches of snow, and a blizzard dumped almost as much on us at the beginning of April in 1986 and again, in 2014, the last spiteful gesture of winter hit us on tax day, which made it even worse. So don’t relax too soon.

Yesterday a whole hour of sleep was snatched away from us by the arbitrary imposition of so-called "daylight saving time." Not only do we suffer this annual act of daylight robbery, but we waste half of Sunday trying and failing to reset all our digital timepieces, although in this age of atomic clocks they should reset themselves.